Digging for cryptocurrency: The newbie's guide to mining altcoins A few weeks ago, when our own "Arscoin" cryptocurrency was first minted, it looked like Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson would control the majority of the coins. He started mining early, and he has a crowd of Linux servers sitting in his closet that can outrun the all-in-one desktops and power-sipping Ultrabooks most of us have on hand. When our little experiment began, I knew enough about Bitcoin and Litecoin mining to know that there are more efficient ways to rack up coins than using the default miner, but I had never actually mined either of those currencies myself. Ars Technica (also, part two on configuring your own email server)

The Internet terror phone Walk down Broadway, past Canal, past banks and furniture stores, Mr. Fashion and sneaker shops and condos, old then new, brick then steel, until the buildings grow taller and begin to take up entire blocks. Turn right at the unopened Pret, across from the McDonald's, down Thomas Street, a one-way single-lane. Look up. You can't miss it: A monolith, brutalist, granite armored, its skeleton colossal slats of moulded concrete. It is said to feature the largest blank facade in the world. The building's six turrets contain air ducts, a whole mess of ventilation for whatever is inside. Whatever is inside -- that's the question. The Awl

Linux Foundation to build massive open online course program with edX, increase access to Linux training for allThe Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced it is building a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program with edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). More than 31 universities have partnered with edX and nearly two million people have accessed its courses online since it launched just 18 months ago. The Linux Foundation

Colin Angle, iRobot CEO: 'Sonny' humanoid robots too expensive to be a reality According to Colin Angle, CEO and founder of advanced robotics company iRobot, the idea of having a humanoid robot like Sonny in Isaac Asimov's Robot series or the robot butler in futuristic cartoon The Jetsons, is pretty unlikely. "Building a robot that has legs and walks around is a very expensive proposition. Mother Nature has created many wonderful things but one thing we do have that nature doesn't is the wheel, a continuous rotating joint, and tracks, so we need to make use of inventions to make things simpler,"... IBTimes UK

Turbo trouble: AMD's Dual Graphics is bugged, introduces game-breaking frame stutter One of the features both AMD and Intel have adopted in the past five years is the idea of a Turbo Mode (Intel) and Turbo Core (AMD). The CPUs of both companies will raise the operating frequency if there’s thermal headroom to do so, then lower it again if the thermal load is too high. Most of the time, this feature is a positive -- unless you happen to be using AMD's latest Kaveri APU, which has a problem that can significantly lower its overall performance under certain specific conditions. ExtremeTech

Proof that 'Fight Club' would have made an awesome video game You guys. You guys! YOU GUYS! The long wait to see "Fight Club" realized as a video game has finally come to an end. The fine folks at CineFix have imagined David Fincher's darkly comic cult favorite as an arcade classic, and it's a beautiful blend of "Street Fighter" and "Streets of Rage," both of which you undoubtedly spent countless hours playing as a kid. Moviefone

Memes, genes and evolution on Facebook One of the more extraordinary ideas about life is that it is fundamentally a phenomenon of information. The thinking is that the basic ingredients for the kind of complex systems we call life are not water or carbon or even DNA. All that’s needed is information and the process of evolution. By that way of thinking life is substrate independent. It can just as easily evolve in silico in a computer simulation as it can in carbon-rich soups on Earth. Indeed, numerous researchers have succeeded in creating what look like simple life forms in computer simulations of evolution (although complex life has so far proved elusive). Medium

The technophobic fantasies of early Michael Crichton One of the best films of 2013, Spike Jonze's Her, concerns a man who falls in love with his computer's operating system. It's easy to imagine a film with a similar premise appearing in a different decade -- extremely easy, actually -- but it's hard to imagine it taking the form it does in Her. Even factoring out Jonze's unique imagination, and factoring in thoughtful exceptions like A.I. (and, well, Short Circuit), we've only recently become cozy enough with computers that stories of them becoming unexpectedly self-aware don't automatically carry nightmarish implications. The Dissolve

A brief history of databases Databases are mundane, the epitome of the everyday in digital society. Despite the enthusiasm and curiosity that such a ubiquitous and important item merits, arguably the only people to discuss them are those with curiosity enough to thumb through the dry and technical literature that chronicles the database's ascension. Which is a shame, because the use of databases actually illuminates so much about how we come to terms with the world around us. The history of databases is a tale of experts at different times attempting to make sense of complexity. VVVNT

Tomorrow's apps will come from brilliant (and risky) Bitcoin code For many, bitcoin -- the distributed, worldwide, decentralized crypto-currency -- is all about money … or, as recent events have shown, about who invented it. Yet the actual innovation brought about by bitcoin is not the currency itself but the platform, which is commonly referred to as the "blockchain" -- a distributed cryptographic ledger shared amongst all nodes participating in the network, over which every successfully performed transaction is recorded. Wired

Do you have computer vision syndrome? Those of us who spend two or more continuous hours at a computer most days are, the American Optometric Association says, at risk for eye problems. Here are some things to do to avoid the specter of Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS). The Atlantic